Ben DayNOW
Standing out in the prison yard the other day, he smelled smoke. Smoke was floating on a current of air about eight feet above his head, and he pictured the field fires of autumn, back when he was a kid, flames marching across the soil in flickering lines, burning away what’s not useful. He’d hated being a farm kid, but now that’s all he thought about. Outside. At night, when the other men were making their sticky sounds, he’d close his eyes and see acres of sorghum, rattling at his knees with those shiny brown beads, like a girl’s jewelry. He’d see the Flint Hills of Kansas, with their eerie, flattened tops, like each mound was waiting for its own coyote to howl from it. Or he’d close his eyes and picture his foot, slopped deep in mud, the feel of the earth sucking him in, hol
